15 Jul 2024 Football, free expression, and the defeat of fascism

Football (soccer), the world’s most popular—and we would argue most beautiful—sport, has become a multi-million-dollar industry marked by astronomical salaries, stadiums that look like spaceships, and billion-dollar sponsorship and television deals.

The sport is regulated by FIFA at the global level and groups like CONMEBOL and UEFA at the regional level, entities which have grown so powerful that in some cases they have even managed to change domestic regulations for their benefit.

As part of their regulatory efforts, the bodies that govern football have made every effort to “depoliticize” the game, going as far as to issue hefty fines to players and clubs displaying political messages.

All of this of course while selecting countries with terrible human rights records to hold their tournaments. And while regulating political speech on the pitch sort of makes sense to ensure inclusion, football ultimately belongs to all of us and trying to obscure its political, race, and class dimensions will always be futile.

Last week, the modern form of the game seems to have shed its politically sanitized and pro-corporate clothes when several leading players of the French men’s national football team, which was competing in the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany until it was eliminated by Spain last week, took a public stance against the far right. Players like Kylian Mbappé and Jules Koundé issued public declarations against the Rassemblement National, a political movement with deep roots in the fascist Front National party, that was leading in France’s legislative elections.

The Rassemblement National was ultimately defeated in the second-round election on 7 July. This was thanks in part to the efforts of these players who called for a national grassroots movement to stop the far right from winning power, a development which would have been a catastrophe for France’s efforts to advance social and climate justice.

As part of their calls against right-wing extremism, these remarkable football players, most of whom are racialized and grew up in low-income neighbourhoods across France, called for a country that would uphold diversity as a key principle.

In doing so, these players joined the many others who have used their position to call for social justice, promote democracy, and denounce anti-rights rhetoric. Some of these include Spain’s Jenni Hermoso’s struggle against sexual assault following the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Brazil’s Sócrates’s resistance against military dictatorship in his country in the 1980s, and Ukraine’s 1942 Dynamo Kiev squad who defied the Nazis.

WACC salutes the French players for using their right to free expression, one of the most fundamental communication rights, to take a stand for democracy, inclusion, and human rights. May others in similar positions follow their lead as the world struggles with the multiple crises of war, climate change, gender-based violence, and xenophobic rhetoric.